Living Online

Slip Past Speed Traps

What's the only sound worse than a baby's cry reverberating through an airplane fuselage? Answer: a highway patrol car's siren signaling you to pull over. Its modulating wail is a downright health hazard--your heart rate races, and you begin to hallucinate about insurance premium hikes and hefty fines. Radar and laser detectors go only so far in preventing speeding tickets--cops rely on tried-and-true "pacing" when they get in a mood to issue citations. Before your head out on the highway, take a detour at the WWW Speedtrap Registry (speedtrap.com) to find where the law will be lurking. With a page dedicated to speed trap locations in every U.S. state (and other countries), Speedtrap.com is updated frequently by folks sharing their tales of encounters with Officer Friendly and his thick citation pad. Be sure to check out the section that provides descriptions of the different types of patrol cars in each state.

Flame Extinguisher

Bounce Spam Mail is a little program you can use to stay off spammers' lists. I use it to head off flame wars (jargon for online cuss-fights). When some hothead e-mails a page of invective to me, I use Bounce Spam Mail to send the message back. The program makes it appear as though my e-mail address is invalid, so the flamer thinks I never even saw the message. It's like getting a letter returned with "no such address" stamped on it by the post office. It makes the flamers feel like they were howling in the wind. Download Bounce Spam Mail from www.er.uqam.ca/merlin/fg591543/bsm/.

Online Games that Don't Suck

Want a taste of hell on earth? Try online bingo. The last time I played it I found myself competing with 742 other people for a prize of $2. I've also tried online chess, poker and backgammon. Often, my computer crashed trying to run the games. When they did work, they ran slowly. The much-touted "community-enhancing" chat function in most online games is no fun either, because what do you really want to say to your Chinese checkers opponent in Duluth--"Good move, tiger"? I was ready to give up online gaming when a friend told me about the games on Bezerk (won.net/gamerooms/bezerk/). Unlike old games shoehorned to fit the Web experience, these are game shows designed to be played online. My favorite Bezerk diversion is You Don't Know Jack, a high-energy trivia game with topics such as "Men Are From Mars, Women Cut Off Their Penises," and "Don't Piss Off the Guy Who Serves Your Food." Wisely avoiding bandwidth-hogging video and complex animation, You Don't Know Jack makes excellent use of audio to give you the feeling of being on a television game show. There's a new episode available every Monday, and you can play with up to three friends at once. I also like Bezerk's Acrophobia, a game in which you compete with a dozen other players to come up with the most clever words to fit a nonsense acronym, and What's the Big Idea? which is like Family Feud produced by Indiana Jones.

Build your Portfolio Drip by Drip

In the Eighties my stockbroker--a guy I knew only by phone--convinced me to squander several thousand dollars on a tomato paste factory, and charged me more than $100 to buy and sell the shares. As soon as web-based brokerages appeared, I moved my entire (yet puny) stock portfolio online and started saving a bundle on commissions. Many e-brokerages charge less than $12 a trade. Recently, I found out how to invest in the stock market and pay zero commissions. The method is called the Dividend Re-Investment Plan. DRIPs allow investors to purchase stock directly from a company. You can buy as little as one share, and the dividends go toward the purchase of additional shares. More than 800 companies, from IBM to Walmart, offer dividend reinvestment plans. The best place to find out about DRIPs is at dripcentral.com. The site has a searchable list of companies. You'll also find links to agents that streamline DRIP investing at much lower rates than you'd pay a broker to buy shares.

Demystifying Computer Viruses

As the Melissa panic last spring demonstrated, if you don't practice safe computing, you can end up infecting your hard drive and spreading a virus to others. But the dangers of viruses have been blown out of proportion. You've probably received warning e-mail from good-intentioned folks who think computer viruses are able to propagate through your home wiring system, reset the VCR and pop the lightbulb in your refrigerator. The truth is, viruses do not exist in e-mail messages. They must be transmitted through programs, which are typically delivered via e-mail as attachments. The best way to prevent a viral infection is by never downloading a file from the web, or by never opening an attachment sent in an e-mail. Likewise, the best way to prevent venereal disease is by never having sex. But if a life without sex or new software sounds as unbearable to you as it does to me--and it sounds terrible to me--your next line of defense will be to make use of solid information. The latest news on computer viruses can be found at kumite.com.

Give us five Minutes, We'll Give you the Web

The web, by any standard, is huge. It contains at least 250 million pages. The bad news is you'd die before you could see them all. The good news is that 99 percent of them aren't worth looking at. (If you doubt it, conduct your own survey by using the Web Autopilot at www.mit.edu/people/mkgray/autopilot.html.) Even if only one percent of the web is worth looking at, that still leaves millions of pages of good stuff. It may seem hopeless, but by using web digests, news junkies can catch up on the best of the Net's daily dishing of dirt.

Journalist Jim Romenesko's sleekly designed Obscure Store (obscurestore.com) is updated every weekday morning with at least a dozen items culled from newspapers round the world. Whether reporting on a 79-year-old woman who engaged in hand-to-paw combat with a wild fox for 12 hours, or a student who sued her high school after it forbade her from wearing a pentagram to class, the Obscure Store has a wealth of topical trivia that will turn you into the hit of the office mailing list. Another daily digest, robotwisdom.com, offers headlines from around the web, along with webcam-of-the-hour images. For a good digest of Internet-related tidbits, try Dave Pell's Davenetics (davenetics.com). For condensed versions of the major daily papers, visit slate.com (which recently abandoned subscription charges and began giving away its contents). The truly ravenous will love www.news hub.com, which updates its headlines every 15 minutes.

If you decide that daily digests should become part of your morning routine, then start using quickbrowse.com. This free service will compile all your favorite sites on one long page. That way, you can toast your English muffins while Quickbrowse grabs sites. That will allow you to read the compiled digest without having to load the pages one-by-one. You can even configure Quickbrowse to e-mail your page to you. It's like getting a morning newspaper that has only the stuff you want to read.

Discs for Dollars

I have too many CDs. Sloppy towers of jewel boxes are stacked around my stereo system, threatening to topple over any time a Harley rumbles by. Whenever the clutter becomes hazardous, I sell discs to the local used CD store. This time, however, I avoided the trip and sold them to Cash for CDs (cashforcds.com) instead. The site makes it easy to offload your idle CDs. You start by listing the discs you want to get rid of (you have to sell at least six at a time). Cash for CDs gives you an instant quote. They offered me $19 for six CDs I hadn't listened to since Clinton took office. A few days later, a postage-prepaid package arrived in my mailbox. I slipped the CDs in it, sent it off, and a week later I got my check. Very cool. Now, if only there were a cashforoldpizzaboxes.com.

You may contact Mark Frauenfelder at [email protected].